While we're always guaranteed to hear about the deals Apple managed to nab, it's far more rare to hear about the ones that got away -- such as a potential partnership with Goodreads prior to Amazon snapping the company up.

Friday marks the end of the March business month, which means Apple has yet to release any significant new products for the entire first calendar quarter of this year. We're pretty sure the folks in Cupertino aren't just taking naps at their desk, however, and we fully expect to see them unleash a lineup of new stuff soon enough. Until then, here's what you might have missed on Thursday...

An ideal world would be one in which you hit publish and the readers come flocking. However as Mark Edwards recalls, getting from five copies a day to topping the Amazon charts takes a great deal of work. “We blogged, used Facebook and Twitter, posted on forums and networked like crazy with other writers and readers,” he says. “We submitted the book for reviews on sites and did everything we could to let people know it existed. It took a long time -- four months from publication to the top 10, spending two or three hours on it every evening. It was exhausting, but worth it in the end.”